Principles for Relationships from God's Word by Claudio Consuegra

More divorce?

Some Pharisees came to test him. They asked, “Can a husband divorce his wife?” Mark 10:2 (GW)

Evidently conservative Christians are not only failing to live up to their pro-family standards of marriage, they are giving the rest of the world a pretty bad example. The findings of authors Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak[i] in the area of marriage are provocative and should give us all as parents and as a church some very important messages. They conclude that, “the results here show that communities with large concentrations of conservative Protestants actually produce higher divorce rates than others, both because conservative Protestants themselves exhibit higher divorce risk and because individuals in communities dominated by conservative Protestants face higher divorce risks.”

The question we need to ask ourselves is, “why would conservative churches have a higher divorce rate?’ Glass and Levchak point to evidence that conservative Protestants and their communities encourage young people to marry and have children earlier, sometimes before their educations are completed. As a result, these early-marrying couples face a double dilemma of learning to live together, and for probably raising children together, while also struggling to get by in an economy that is increasingly tough on those who don’t finish college.

Glass and Levchak speculate that perhaps other conservative Protestant norms may contribute to undermine stable marriages. For instance, the stand against premarital sex and abortion, which might encourage earlier marriage and childbearing, and the disdain for religiously “mixed” marriages, combine to create a mixture of ingredients which, paradoxically, may undermine the very thing conservative Protestants are trying to strengthen.

What is the lesson for us? Encourage delaying marriage until after college; this will allow for more growth and maturity as well as a better financial start and future for the couple.

Father God, help us to be careful not to encourage early marriage for our children lest we be setting them up for a weak beginning and a possible end to their marriage.